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For supermarket workers it must seem like death by a thousand cuts. Retail is the UK’s biggest private sector employer but over the past few months there has been a relentless slew of redundancy announcements dressed up as “re-sets” or “efficiency” drives.

As a result, roughly 25,000 jobs have been cut by the so-called “Big Four” over the last three years. It’s still a small percentage of the 950,000 workers the major stores employ, but the majority of the redundancies announced so far have been full-time staff – where the biggest savings can be made – not the casual or part-time staff that make up half of the retail workforce.

The job cuts are a necessary evil for the supermarkets as they try to pacify shareholders by stripping out costs in an attempt to stay profitable whilst battling threats from all angles.

The rampantly expanding discounters Aldi, Lidl and B&M Bargains have been luring shoppers away from the traditional beasts of retail, forcing them to slash shelf prices. At the same time, changing shopping habits has meant fewer shoppers visit grocers’ larger stores – either choosing to buy their food online or make more frequent trips to their local convenience store. Traditional retailers are scrambling to change how they serve their customers in order to revive sales growth, but their scale means that they lack the agility to move fast enough.

Tesco’s wage bill is around £4.5bn, meaning every 1pc increase costs Britain’s biggest retailer around £45m. But the introduction of the national living wage has meant a 15pc increase to its hourly wages. It’s been estimated that the retail sector has to find an extra £3bn to afford the cost of the living wage over the next two years and that’s at a time when consumer spending is expected to come under pressure.

As a result, the race to strip out costs in order to afford the rising wage bill has meant that it is often the retail staff that are bearing the brunt of the pain. The Government’s efforts to boost pay will end up having the undesired result of fewer people working. Low-skilled workers, such as checkout staff, are already being replaced by self-checkout screens. Meanwhile, Amazon this week opened its first shop without cash tills in the ultimate dystopian vision of technology making retail workers redundant.

Amazon's Go cashierless convenience store

The wave of jobs cuts is partly a hangover of the so-called “space race” in the boom times when the fastest way to grow sales was to add more stores, with the inevitable consequence of more staff. “They became these obese organisations,” says Clive Black at Shore Capital. Faced with slowing sales and falling profits, the supermarkets have been put on a strict diet.

The side-effect of these seemingly relentless job cuts is that it will end up exaggerating the polarisation of fortunes across the country. Retailers will not be shutting stores and slashing jobs in towns where there are affluent customers who are still spending.

Instead, retail bosses privately admit that it will be the deprived neighbourhoods like Rochdale, Darlington, Rotherham, Hartlepool and Dewsbury that cuts will be made as they lose out to the discounters. As a result, unemployment in those areas will rise, there will be less disposable income going around to spend in the remaining shops and the vicious circle will continue.

Despite the staggering number of redundancies, the retail jobs crisis still seems to be under the radar. The British Retail Consortium has urged its members to refer to retail as an “industry” rather than “sector” in a bid to appeal to politicians who are more concerned with saving mining and manufacturing jobs. Commentators have said that the lack of support is partly because unlike mining and manufacturing hubs, which politicians can tour for photo opportunities, retail employment is spread across the country.

In the US, the full impact of the retail bloodbath is slowly coming to the public consciousness. Department stores, including Macy’s and JC Penny’s, have shed almost 100,000 jobs in the past year, more than the total number of coal miners or steel workers in the US. A record 6,700 US stores shut last year meanwhile Credit Suisse analysts reckon a quarter of the 1,200 nation’s shopping malls will shut over the next five years.

Online giant Amazon is often blamed for upsetting the retail landscape. But economist Michael Mandel last year provided a counter-theory estimating that since the recession, the e-commerce sector has created 355,000 new jobs in the US, outstripping the 50,000 total jobs lost in physical retail stores. His analysis has already been picked apart by critics who argue that the warehouse jobs will soon be replaced by automation. But Mandel goes some way to show the evolving nature of the retail workforce.

However, in the race to catch up with the pace of online, the supermarkets need to remember that the one thing the internet can’t offer is human interaction with shop assistants and there is a value to this. If they cut too savagely and the consumer experience is worsened either by lengthy checkout queues or bad service, then they will be punished even further.